I recently lost one of my hard drives and have to reinstall windows 7. I'd rather not go back and install windows xp or vista and upgrade, and I know there are tricks do doing a clean install with an upgrade key, but none of them have worked for me. I tried the double install trick, which gave me the "key is not valid" message. Then I tried the regedit and rearm, which didn't work either. It was weird because my 'MediaBootInstall' key was already set at '0' instead of '1', but the activation still gives me the "key is not valid" message.
I keep reading guide after guide thinking I missed a step, but arn't seeing anything. I did a clean install on my hard drive, didn't try to activate, did upgrade install over top of it, then tried to activate, and it fails. Only thing I can think of is that I'm not using my upgrade disk. I download/burned the windows 7 home premium disk, and am using my upgrade key with it.
If you use VAMT or other methods of checking an upgrade key versus a full version key you will see that the licensing and algorithms are EXACTLY the same. Hell even the discs are exactly the same. Simply do a full clean install and when it asks for the key, put it in. Everything will work fine that way. If you do anything else, it will give you licensing errors.
I think I figured out what was going on. I re-did the install following this : *can't post links, its the clean install guide. and realized that I had no "windows.old" folder after the install, and that windows wasn't creating a system reserved partition. It looks like my other hard drive is loading as the C: drive before the install. Trying again, ill update.
didnt work. I should be seeing a window.old folder after the install right? (yes i did md c:\Windows)
windows only creates the system reserved partition if you don't have your hdd partitioned beforehand. if you install to unallocated space it will create the 100mb bootloader partition, but if you have all your space used, as in all the space is allocated to partitions it won't delete and recreate partitions with the 100mb bootloader. one reason why i've never understood why someone "patched" windows 7 to not do this because there is such an easy way around this by making your own partitions before install
Everytime i've done the install mediabootinstall is already '0', but still won't accept my key. But im still getting a "invalid key" message. Only thing I can think of now, is that I messed my key up somehow or microsoft has blocked it (even though its legit, I called them about the key a couple days ago)